Holiday Byron Bay
Bona & Kate & me
They ask what’s wrong, not what happened
This is an excellent article in the Socialist worker on mental health.
https://socialistworker.org/2017/08/02/they-ask-whats-wrong-not-what-happened
Summary:
One major point is that the health services are inaccessible to most who need them.
Related to the capitalistic neo-liberalism that is at the heart of that is a bigger cultur
Line & Wash Gallery
I’m learning to use Jetpack for this blog. I’m also working on my art journal This is one of the Gallery sets that was in is my art blog but is not there now! Jetpack is doing a nice job!
I used to a lot of these, but no more? I still like them. I’d even forgotten there was a name for the genre.
Joined online creativity group with Jan Allsopp
I’ve joined a creativity group with Jan Allsopp who I’ve known online for a long time. My commitment is for a month (at least). Committed to 15 min a day for the month of January – I’m working on a book. I’ll post more about the book as time goes on. Today is day six and I’ve produced a lot each day. I find it helpful to have such a strong focus. A simple idea, choose a route – i.e. the tools. Mine are the Google files (Doc and Slides) I’m using to write the book. In addition we create ‘cruise control’ – a voluntary frame in which to work. Some voluntary restrictions I’m using are:
- No new sketches.
- Work on the book proposal only, not the whole book.
Also good to see other peoples art – so far so good. It will get harder as the month intensifies.
This is what the spreads in the book look like:
Life, Whole Earth & Ivan Illich
Our cat died a few days ago.
Little
I miss her. It was time for her to go. It is a marker of some sort. I got the cat for my 60th birthday, and now the cat has died of old age! Her birth and death are like cairns along a track in the bush. Markers. Her grave in the backyard is literally a bit like a cairn. Human life can be measured in cat lives. Maybe I have one or max two to go.
With the strange absence of the cat, I’m looking back at other life cairns. They pop up all over the place.
Stumbled onto a link to the Whole Earth site. Now that was a marker. That first Catalog, late sixties, literally changed my life. A counterculture ethos emerged just when I was ready. Led on to creating an urban community in Christchurch, Chippenham, now Heartwood.
The first thing on the Whole Earth site that stood out was an item by Ivan Illich. He is one of the influencers in my life. I devoured his book Deschooling Society – that led to Four Avenues School.
http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/2061/article/248/20th.anniversary.rendezvous.-..ivan.illich
Politics & Peaky Blinders
Just watched the last episode of season 4 of the Peaky Blinders. Loved it. I hear there will be a season 5, and the show is set up to deal with British politics in the 1920’s . Got me looking around and found this piece – a good bit of background reading.
Astonishing matrimonial psychodramas
The concept of medial understanding was the forerunner of what I call today co-conscious and co-unconscious states. Such a technique of reciprocal comprehension and “interpersonal memory” seemed to make possible astonishing matrimonial psychodramas, husband and wife reaching back into their first encounter and reliving, often with astonishing detail, all their moments of love and suffering, their silent tragedies and their moments of great decision
(Moreno, 1923).
Just how to produce such dramas remains somewhat obscure to me. Will experiment – and research!
The quote above is from this article by JL “Interpersonal Therapy and Co-Unconscious States, A Progress Report in Psychodramatic Theory” originally from: Group Psychotherapy, 14 (3-4), 234-241 (Sept-Dec., 1961) See PDF below.
Who we are
This is my summary of what Moreno means by the social atom. In psychotherapy that “atom” or pattern is the client. When two of these “patterns” connect in love, then a lifelong process can follow. Maybe it is true love at first sight? Unlikely, love is blind. One possibility is to move from blind love to deep mature connection. The other possibility is hell. A third is lifeless boredom.
It’s OK
